On Sunday, Boeing unveiled its first 787 Dreamliner at the company’s final assembly plant in Everett, Washington. With former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw hosting the festivities, Boeing broadcasted and webcasted the event in nine languages to more than 45 countries. Boeing Commercial Airplanes VP and GM Mike Bair made an important remark for those of us interested in collaboration: "I am so proud of the men and women of Boeing and of our partner employees in the 70 companies that have brought this airplane to the passengers of the world."

Bair’s reference to “partner employees” is significant in that Boeing is moving away from designing and manufacturing planes by itself. Instead the company is becoming a large-scale systems integrator and collaborating with global partners to produce the 787 Dreamliner and other planes. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I describe the 3 levels of collaboration at Boeing and how CIO Scott Griffin and Sergey Kravchenko, president of Boeing Russia, worked together to create a real-time collaborative design environment and the culture to support it. The environment, culture and tools that Griffin and Kravchenko have implemented have helped create a more efficient and profitable business model for Boeing. 

The book uses Boeing as a model for the global collaborative enterprise (GCE), which I define as “a collection of interdependent companies that engage in shared creation of value, often in real time.” The partner employees to which Mike Bair refers are the collaborators who comprise Boeing’s GCE. While more and more companies are collaborating internally, very few are in the same league with Boeing when it comes to collaborating with business partners.